[Petrarch of the VBB]

Originally posted by THUNDER
Upgrading from Win98 to XP - Anything I need?

How about a CAT scan?

[Turnsky]

jeez guys, give it a rest, i'll admit that OS's all have thier pros and cons, i'm also thinking of moving up to xp, because i've been on 98 for too long (it ain't SE) and i can't be bothered having 2000 pro ***** about the HCL, my machine is predominately a gaming machine and from what i hear, XP makes the best use of system resources... and besides, USB support is better in xp, and i'm getting sick of pulling my case out of it's cubby-hole removing the usb scanner plug, and putting it back in again, EVERY time i start the computer, just to scan a couple of images..

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Razor


Oh sorry sir. Please forgive me. I must say that you really sound like a really experienced expert even though you are only 22 years old. Aren't ya? Aren't ya? Hey is it true that it was you who developed that NTFS? You must have worked pretty hard on it. You know, removing bugs from oldies and all, adding new stuff... So you must know why it is so cool and even know how to format it in DOS and all and not even get that message: Partition format error or something like that. Yeah all those people who attempted that must be very stupid right? But not you.

 

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
You actually got somethin' to say, son, or are you just gonna stand around screaming "No it isn't! No it isn't!"

Return to your dark lord, foul excrescence. We have no need of your XP-spawned kind around here.

Stryke, all you're doing is going on and on about the same old crap that was rebuked many a time.  I've been runnign XP for well over a year now and other than some problems with Gator (caused because I installed the adware version of DivX to try out the features of the pro ver) which royally ****ed it up.....I haven't had the first single issue.  I haven't even had a single program crash on me ever since I installed 2k, let alone XP.

I've been saying this for years, and it appears I'll have to say it again.  Computer stability immediately reflects the intelligence of the user.  If its crashing all the time, then I suggest you stop what you're doing and actually take a course or two on how to properly use one.

[Stryke 9]

Vertigo: And whether or not a car crashes reflects upon the competence of the driver. If you think that's all there is to it, though, I recommend you stop wasting money on those unneeded brakes and steering adjustments. We'll all get to see just how competent you are.

A big part of understanding computers is knowing what **** not to put on it. Once again, if you're under the illusion that any reasonably competent user can operate their computer regardless of what's on it, I have several dozen software solutions for you. Most aren't even Trojans, but I can guarantee that they will crash your computer, and they will keep it crashed. Most programs are on a slightly lesser order of evil, but if you aren't crashing ****, you just plain aren't using your computer more than an hour a week, or for anything more complex than typing the letter "a" over and over again in Notepad. Ask any renderer, modeler, or progger here. ****, ask anyone who word-processes multiple pages a day. "Never touching your box" does not qualify as "treating it properly", and you aren't the better user for it. As demonstrated by the fact that you were dumb enough to let Gator adware on your hard disk, which is... say, two steps above chewing on the power cords.


Never mind that you obviously never even read a single ****ing post in here, because I never say that XP is particularly crashy. If anything, it's less so than 2K, 98, et al. But you wouldn't know that, because if you actually took the time to read before rebutting you'd go over your five-minute-a-day limit for computer use the nice man set for you and might experience some fatal crashes. Twit.

[Vertigo1]

Excuse me?  I use it DAILY for several hours.  Most of the time, I'm doing HEAVY rendering with scenes in the upwards of dozens of MILLIONS of polygons at once.  But then again, what do I know?  Maybe its because I actually bought DECENT hardware, keep everything up-to-date, and *gasp* actually check for virii and spyware!  Gee, who would've thought?  Now shutup Stryke, and don't presume that you know a damn thing about me.  Now unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that XP is unstable as you say it is, CONCESSION ACCEPTED.

[Stryke 9]

Yeah, you spend all those hours checking for viruses and spyware, and yet Gator, possibly the biggest ****ing spyware/adware package, with blinking lights and warning signs and klaxons all over it, got by you. Real good there. Maybe you should get a job with the INS, nyet?

And I don't really give a crap if you're rich enough to upgrade any software that does a simple bugfix or makes a new color interface and then adds a decimal point and $200 to the name. I'm not, and since I'm neither a snotty bastard (mostly) nor newbie enough to imagine that taking up more CPU cycles makes something better, I'm not gonna assume anyone else is. Once again, no good reflection on you, except that you're overpaid, which could be good or not, depending on how you look at it.


And millions of polygons? The most high-detail render of yours I've seen is this. At maybe 2000, at the absolute most. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

[Vertigo1]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Yeah, you spend all those hours checking for viruses and spyware, and yet Gator, possibly the biggest ****ing spyware/adware package, with blinking lights and warning signs and klaxons all over it, got by you. Real good there. Maybe you should get a job with the INS, nyet?

It was a fresh install you moron.  I knew it was adware, which is why I never even bothered to install anything of any importance just incase it DID furbar the OS.

STILL no proof from you that XP is as bad as you make it out to be.  I accept your concession.

[Stryke 9]

No proof? Here, I'll just get you to say it. Open up your C drive. That's right, the one under "My Computer" with the "C" and the picture of the hard disk. Now highlight your Windows file. You can find your Windows file, right? Check under "Properties". See all that space? All those millions of bytes that could be used for something beter, and in any other OS would be?

Now, any person who takes good care of their comp has a RAM counter. Open that sucka up. How much memory is being used, with you just idling? Specific numbers, please. See, that pretty Maclike interface has a price.

Finally, install a fresh new copy of Ray Dream Studio on there. Or most any black-box converter. Can't do it, can ya? Neither could I. So much for all that famed "compatibility". A good bit better than 2K, I'll give ya that, but 2K sucks, and it's still not half as good as, say, 95 in that regard.

[Vertigo1]

Windows folder: 1.32GB (which isn't much larger than the 2k install sitting on my  "don't care" box right behind me.)  That also includes the backup files when I installed SP1 (274MB).  That brings it down to just over 1GB.  Considering that a full Win9x install is just over 300 something MB, thats not too bad.

As for free RAM, I've got ~390MB free (out of 512).  Thats with Miranda ICQ, WinMX, Mozilla, 3dsmax5, iTouch software (for wireless kb and mouse), AtGuard, and Volume Control running in the background.

[Terorist]

Ok, I'm a Win2k user that will never install XP, and can't be bothered to take part in this pissing contest, but I'd like to point out something. The evil (gasp!) features of XP include the whole activation philosophy, MS spyware that calls home reporting stuff and the XP-specific security holes (old ones including UPnP and that one remote helpdesk thingy (or whatever it was) exploit for example - and who knows how many new ones are to be found). I'm not claiming that w2k is the best either, but it's clearly the 'lesser evil' and as a bonus it doesn't sodomize the user every time you try to do something more experimental or tweak something a little.

I couldn't care less about eye candy, and FYI, the gaming usability comparison of w2k and xp isn't a clear case. Would you believe if I claimed w2k was superior? No? Why would you believe someone claiming likewise about xp superiority either? Both are very similar, based on the same NT kernel family - differences are in the fudge built upon it. Check the figures of comparison reviews again and use your brains. Arguments like Turnsky's "I hear xp makes the best use of system resources" make me chuckle (mildly). Also, his reasoning about his win98's poor USB support as grounds for choosing xp over w2k is simply... mysterious.

Both systems have their share of users claiming they never crash, both have people complaining about constant problems and BSODs. Try W2k first (it's by default the lesser evil), and if it doesn't work for you, go on to XP, but be sure to kill the spyware etc...
My two cents.

[Stryke 9]

It's taking up more than 100Mb, which is obscene. If I had 100Mb of RAM less, I'd probably never see the ends of some renders. To put that in perspective, WinAmp, the fattest program made for timesharing I have, takes up about 200Mb of RAM, and it's like ****ting a watermelon for the computer to play a song and run a 3D program at once. And I have two CPUs, and quite a lot of RAM. Windows 98/2000, with all the peripherals, takes up some 14Mb at a time on mine, last I checked. For shame.

And I don't know where you learned your counting, but 300 vs. 1000+ in one or two "upgrades" isn't just bad, it's horrendous, particularly when XP really doesn't do much of anything more than any of its predecessors, just sticks some fancy graphics and one of those horrible "intuitive" interfaces. It's all that recursive coding- they don't actually have people do this **** anymore, it's one of those AIs writing the code that ain't much smarter than the one making bad guys run into walls and keep walking into them when you're shooting at them in a game- the code's all snarled, with functions that never are needed or used going on and off over and over and over again, burning up your memory... About two months ago, someone installed Office XP on a five or ten-year-old box I've got access to, computer with a crotchety old motherboard/CPU hookup but a ridiculous amount of memory. The computer just stopped working. Like that. Took fifteen minutes to open any light program, like Notepad, could literally wait all day for it to open Photoshop. Took XP off, thing was running just fine, almost as fast as the average comp nowadays. It was like a virus.

XP isn't the worst OS ever, but it's an almost imperceptible improvement over 2000, and if you factor in the obscene price tag and all that tons of system resources it's hogging, it's worse- and since when you put them together, the cost really includes the cost of upgrading all your hardware right away for another thousand or so, it's just surreal. Why the **** would you ever blow all that money- hell, I haven't updated my graphics card or CPU in years, and my comp's quite a lot faster than any brand spanking new XP box I've run. It'd be nice if I could get it to accept any of the new memory cards I've got sitting around, let me do fullscreen minute-long animations like I'd like to (and which no stock XP setup can do without thousands of dollars of upgrades- and which you probably couldn't work out without tens of thousands in software to boot), but that's a hardware issue.

Basically, it's Microsoft suckering people into buying the more expensive product, because they can. Calls to mind Apple's "Ooh! Shiny!" campaign of a year or so back with the iMacs, except worse because iMacs actually served a function in being small, and XP does not except in being a Trojan.





Now, if you compare XP to the mythic Palladium, you might find some nicer things to say. But that's about it right there as far as things XP is actually preferable to.

[diamondgeezer]

As regards the performance part of the above XP bashing, my box gives virtually the same 3D Mark score whether I be in XP or 98 (around 10K, for the benefit of those people with a lower score than me )

*waits for Stryke to explain why either a) 3D Mark scores don't mean a flying ****, or b) I'm wrong*

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
but it's an almost imperceptible improvement over 2000

ROFL!

Upgrading to XP from 2000 was like Night and Day. Stuff that I'd struggled to get working under 2000 installed right off the CDs in most cases under XP. I was even able to get rid of my 9x dual boot because XP had a compatibility patch for the one game I'd never ever been able to get working under 2000. My hardware was also supported better, my USB steering wheel didn't kill my mouse every time it was plugged in. 2000 was the bees knees when the only alternatives were Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 but it's left eating serious digital dust by XP and will never, ever be installed on any of my machines again.

[Stryke 9]

You're wrong. Just because predictability might comfort some of the more "special" of those here.


Actually, I've heard of 3D Mark, and that's about it, so I don't have a real opinion about its accuracy. I assume it's a RAM counter, but that's where my familiarity ends and unlike a certain set of individuals here I don't like to make claims about stuff I don't know anything about, really. Plus, any claims I made I'd have to make would hence be entirely based on me making things up, which is fun but largely unconvincing.


3D Mark is made by Satanist death chimps! It will cause the electromagnets in your monitor to give you testicular cancer! Osama and Saddam are both fans of 3D Mark!


LSD: Yeh, I hear XP is compatible with a lot of games. That's good, I guess, but irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I play games about twice a year nowadays, except when some addiction hits me for a time and I don't, technically speaking, sleep for a week or two. The current one is Deus Ex, but I'm parceling out the obsession. And XP is emphatically not compatible with much of any of the oldish graphics software, equipment, or abandonware games I kept because they happen to be really, really good. I tried, and it actually ate my CD on one occasion. Had to pry that sucker open with a screwdriver, and you'd better believe I wasn't gentle after the crap it'd given me.

And with a bit of work, you can get pretty much any program to run on 98. 2000, not so much, but then again I was always more than a little leery of NT suckage being introduced into an OS.

[Admiral LSD]

It's not just games, XP automatically copied the registry entries for stuff like ICQ and GetRight into areas of the registry accessible to more than just Administrators. Previously, I'd have had to install the program seperately for each user to achieve the same result.

[Stryke 9]

Ahh, ICQ. Now I actually like XP, so long as it stays the hell away from my computers. Encourages ICQ patronage, which means easy hacking, so people'll naturally stop bothering with my more secure box and I can eventually take down this damned firewall.


And I have no idea why you'd need to install the program for every user, just because they can't access the registry on their own. Care to enlighten me? Everything seems to work fine on this machine...

[Razor]

Originally posted by Vertigo1


 

Hm, people just never learn. Over here

[Stryke 9]

I think he was aware of that. Computer-illiterates still get sarcasm these days.

[Admiral LSD]

My accounts aren't given Administrator priveliges as a rule and the area of the registry where ICQ (and several other programs not designed with NTs multi-user, multi-file registry in mind) dumps its registry settings is read-only to non-Administrators. This means that configuration changes aren't saved between sessions. This can be ignored in a lot of cases, I don't change my FS2 settings often enough to make it a problem for instance, but with GetRight and ICQ it's particularly annoying. The solution is to install the programs as every user who needs them which will put the registry entries in the users own section of the registry giving them read- and write access. XP eliminates this (at least with GetRight and ICQ) saving me a fair amount of time and effort.